by Neil Gaiman
Fat Charlie closed the phone. Then he put on his coat over his tracksuit and, wincing just a little at the terrible unblinking daylight, he went out into the street.
ROSIE NOAH WAS WORRIED, WHICH IN ITSELF WORRIED HER. It was, as so many things in Rosie’s world were, whether she would admit it to herself or not, Rosie’s mother’s fault.
Rosie had become quite used to a world in which her mother hated the idea of her marrying Fat Charlie Nancy. She took her mother’s opposition to the marriage as a sign from the heavens that she was probably doing something right, even when she was not entirely sure in her own mind that this was actually the case.
And she loved him, of course. He was solid, reassuring, sane…
Her mother’s about-turn on the matter of Fat Charlie had Rosie worried, and her mother’s sudden enthusiasm for wedding organization troubled her deeply.
She had phoned Fat Charlie the previous night to discuss the matter, but he was not answering his phones. Rosie thought perhaps he had had an early night.
It was why she was giving up her lunchtime to talk to him.
The Grahame Coats Agency occupied the top floor of a gray Victorian building in the Aldwych, and was at the top of five flights of stairs. There was a lift, though, an antique elevator which had been installed a hundred years before by theatrical agent Rupert “Binky” Butterworth. It was an extremely small, slow, juddery lift whose design and function peculiarities only became comprehensible when you discovered that Binky Butter-worth had possessed the size, shape, and ability to squeeze into small spaces of a portly young hippopotamus, and had designed the lift to fit, at a squeeze, Binky Butterworth and one other, much slimmer, person: a chorus girl, for example, or a chorus boy—Binky was not picky. All it took to make Binky happy was someone seeking theatrical representation squeezed into the lift with him, and a very slow and juddery journey up all six stories to the top. It was often the case that by the time he reached the top floor, Binky would be so overcome by the pressures of the journey that he would need to go and have a little lie-down, leaving the chorus girl or chorus boy to cool his or her heels in the waiting room, concerned that the red-faced panting and uncontrolled gasping for breath that Binky had been suffering from as they reached the final floors meant that he had been having some kind of early Edwardian embolism.
People would go into the lift with Binky Butterworth once, but after that they used the stairs.
Grahame Coats, who had purchased the remains of the Butterworth Agency from Binky’s granddaughter more than twenty years before, maintained the lift was part of history.
Rosie slammed the inner accordion door, closed the outer door, and went into reception, where she told the receptionist she wanted to see Charles Nancy. She sat down beneath the photographs of Grahame Coats with people he had represented—she recognized Morris Livingstone, the comedian, some once famous boy-bands, and a clutch of sports stars who had, in their later years, become “personalities”—the kind who got as much fun out of life as they could until a new liver became available.
A man came into reception. He did not look much like Fat Charlie. He was darker, and he was smiling as if he were amused by everything—deeply, dangerously amused.
“I’m Fat Charlie Nancy,” said the man.
Rosie walked over to Fat Charlie and gave him a peck on the cheek. He said, “Do I know you?” which was an odd thing to say, and then he said, “Of course I do. You’re Rosie. And you get more beautiful every day,” and he kissed her back, touching his lips to hers. Their lips only brushed, but Rosie’s heart began to beat like Binky Butterworth’s after a particularly juddery lift journey pressed up against a chorine.
“Lunch,” squeaked Rosie. “Passing. Thought maybe we could. Talk.”
“Yeah,” said the man who Rosie now thought of as Fat Charlie. “Lunch.”
He put a comfortable arm around Rosie. “Anywhere you want to go for lunch?”
“Oh,” she said. “Just. Wherever you want.” It was the way he smelled, she thought. Why had she never before noticed how much she liked the way he smelled?
“We’ll find somewhere,” he said. “Shall we take the stairs?”
“If it’s all the same to you,” she said, “I think I’d rather take the lift.”
She banged home the accordion door, and they rode down to street level slowly and shakily, pressed up against each other.
Rosie couldn’t remember the last time she had been so happy.
When they got out onto the street Rosie’s phone beeped to let her know she had missed a call. She ignored it.
They went into the first restaurant they came to. Until the previous month it had been a high-tech sushi restaurant, with a conveyor belt that ran around the room carrying small raw fishy nibbles priced according to plate color. The Japanese restaurant had gone out of business and had been instantly replaced, in the way of London restaurants, by a Hungarian restaurant, which had kept the conveyor belt as a high-tech addition to the world of Hungarian cuisine, which meant that rapidly cooling bowls of goulash, paprika dumplings, and pots of sour cream made their way in stately fashion around the room.
Rosie didn’t think it was going to catch on.
“Where were you last night?” she asked.
“I went out,” he said. “With my brother.”
“You’re an only child,” she said.
“I’m not. It turns out I’m half of a matched set.”
“Really? Is this more of your dad’s legacy?”
“Honey,” said the man she thought of as Fat Charlie, “you don’t know the half of it.”
“Well,” she said. “I hope he’ll be coming to the wedding.”
“I don’t believe he would miss it for the world.” He closed his hand around hers, and she nearly dropped her goulash spoon. “What are you doing for the rest of the afternoon?”
“Not much. Things are practically dead back at the office right now. Couple of fund-raising phone calls to make, but they can wait. Is there. Um. Were you. Um. Why?”
“It’s such a beautiful day. Do you want to go for a walk?”
“That,” said Rosie, “would be quite lovely.”
They wandered down to the Embankment and began to walk along the northern back of the Thames, a slow, hand-in-hand amble, talking about nothing much in particular.
“What about your work?” asked Rosie, when they stopped to buy an ice cream.
“Oh,” he said. “They won’t mind. They probably won’t even notice that I’m not there.”
FAT CHARLIE RAN UP THE STAIRS TO THE GRAHAME COATS Agency. He always took the stairs. It was healthier, for a start, and it meant he would never again have to worry about finding himself wedged into the lift with someone else, too close to pretend they weren’t there.
He walked into reception, panting slightly. “Has Rosie been in, Annie?”
“Did you lose her?” said the receptionist.
He walked back to his office. His desk was peculiarly tidy. The clutter of undealt-with correspondence was gone. There was a yellow Post-it note on his computer screen, with “See me. GC” on it.
He knocked on Grahame Coats’s office door. This time a voice said, “Yes?”
“It’s me,” he said.
“Yes,” said Grahame Coats. “Come ye in, Master Nancy. Pull up a pew. I’ve been giving our conversation of this morning a great deal of thought. And it seems to me that I have misjudged you. You have been working here, for, how long…?”
“Nearly two years.”
“You have been working long and hard. And now your father’s sad passing…”
“I didn’t really know him.”
“Ah. Brave soul, Nancy. Given that it is currently the fallow season, how would you react to an offer of a couple of weeks off? With, I hardly need to add, full pay?”
“Full pay?” said Fat Charlie.
“Full pay, but, yes, I see your point. Spending money. I’m sure you could do with a little spending money, couldn’
t you?”
Fat Charlie tried to work out what universe he was in. “Am I being fired?”
Grahame Coats laughed then, like a weasel with a sharp bone stuck in its throat. “Absatively not. Quite the reverse. In fact I believe,” he said, “that we now understand each other perfectly. Your job is safe and sound. Safe as houses. As long as you remain the model of circumspection and discretion you have been so far.”
“How safe are houses?” asked Fat Charlie.
“Extremely safe.”
“It’s just that I read somewhere that most accidents occur in the home.”
“Then,” said Grahame Coats, “I think it vitally important that you are encouraged to return to your own house with all celerity.” He handed Fat Charlie a piece of rectangular paper. “Here,” he said. “A small thank-you for two years of devoted service to the Grahame Coats Agency.” Then, because it was what he always said when he gave people money, “Don’t spend it all at once.”
Fat Charlie looked at the piece of paper. It was a check. “Two thousand pounds. Gosh. I mean, I won’t.”
Grahame Coats smiled at Fat Charlie. If there was triumph in that smile, Fat Charlie was too puzzled, too shaken, too bemused to see it.
“Go well,” said Grahame Coats.
Fat Charlie went back to his office.
Grahame Coats leaned around the door, casually, like a mongoose leaning idly against a snake-den. “An idle question. If, while you are off enjoying yourself and relaxing—a course of action I cannot press upon you strongly enough—if, during this time, I should need to access your files, could you let me know your password?”
“I think your password should get you anywhere in the system,” said Fat Charlie.
“Without doubt it will,” agreed Grahame Coats, blithely. “But just in case. You know computers, after all.”
“It’s mermaid,” said Fat Charlie. “M-E-R-M-A-I-D.”
“Excellent,” said Grahame Coats. “Excellent.” He didn’t rub his hands together, but he might as well have done.
Fat Charlie walked down the stairs with a check for two thousand pounds in his pocket, wondering how he could have so misjudged Grahame Coats for the last two years.
He walked around the corner to his bank, and deposited the check into his account.
Then he walked down to the Embankment, to breathe, and to think.
He was two thousand pounds richer. His headache of this morning had completely gone. He was feeling solid and prosperous. He wondered if he could talk Rosie into coming on a short holiday with him. It was short notice, but still…
And then he saw Spider and Rosie, walking hand in hand on the other side of the road. Rosie was finishing an ice cream. Then she stopped and dropped the remainder of the ice cream into a bin and pulled Spider toward her and, with an ice-creamy mouth, began to kiss him with enthusiasm and gusto.
Fat Charlie could feel his headache coming back. He felt paralyzed.
He watched them kissing. He was of the opinion that sooner or later they would have to come up for air, but they didn’t, so he walked in the other direction, feeling miserable, until he reached the tube.
And he went home.
By the time he got home, Fat Charlie felt pretty wretched, so he got onto a bed that still smelled faintly of Daisy, and he closed his eyes.
Time passed, and now Fat Charlie was walking along a sandy beach with his father. They were barefoot. He was a kid again, and his father was ageless.
So, his father was saying, how are you and Spider getting on?
This is a dream, pointed out Fat Charlie, and I don’t want to talk about it.
You boys, said his father, shaking his head. Listen. I’m going to tell you something important.
What?
But his father did not answer. Something on the edge of the waves had caught his eye, and he reached down and picked it up. Five pointed legs flexed languidly.
Starfish, said his father, musing. When you cut one in half, they just grow into two new starfish.
I thought you said you were going to tell me something important.
His father clutched his chest, and he collapsed onto the sand and stopped moving. Worms came out of the sand and devoured him in moments, leaving nothing but bones.
Dad?
Fat Charlie woke up in his bedroom with his cheeks wet with tears. Then he stopped crying. He had nothing to be upset about. His father had not died; it had simply been a bad dream.
He decided that he would invite Rosie over tomorrow night. They would have steak. He would cook. All would be well.
He got up and got dressed.
He was in the kitchen, twenty minutes later, spooning down a Pot Noodle, when it occurred to him that, although what had happened on the beach had been a dream, his father was still dead.
ROSIE STOPPED IN AT HER MOTHER’S FLAT IN WIMPOLE STREET, late that afternoon.
“I saw your boyfriend today,” said Mrs. Noah. Her given name had been Eutheria, but in the previous three decades nobody had used it to her face but her late husband, and following his death it had atrophied and was unlikely to be used again in her lifetime.
“So did I,” said Rosie. “My god I love that man.”
“Well, of course. You’re marrying him, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes. I mean, I always knew I loved him, but today I really saw how much I loved him. Everything about him.”
“Did you find out where he was last night?”
“Yes. He explained it all. He was out with his brother.”
“I didn’t know he had a brother.”
“He hadn’t mentioned him before. They aren’t very close.”
Rosie’s mother clicked her tongue. “Must be quite a family reunion going on. Did he mention his cousin, too?”
“Cousin?”
“Or maybe his sister. He didn’t seem entirely sure. Pretty thing, in a trashy sort of way. Looked a bit Chinese. No better than she should be, if you ask me. But that’s that whole family for you.”
“Mum. You haven’t met his family.”
“I met her. She was in his kitchen this morning, walking about that place damn near naked. Shameless. If she was his cousin.”
“Fat Charlie wouldn’t lie.”
“He’s a man isn’t he?”
“Mum!”
“And why wasn’t he at work today, anyway?”
“He was. He was at work today. We had lunch together.”
Rosie’s mother examined her lipstick in a pocket mirror, then, with her forefinger, rubbed the scarlet smudges off her teeth.
“What else did you say to him?” asked Rosie.
“We just talked about the wedding, how I didn’t want his best man making one of them near-the-knuckle speeches. He looked to me like he’d been drinking. You know how I warned you about marrying a drinking man.”
“Well, he looked perfectly fine when I saw him,” said Rosie primly. Then, “Oh Mum, I had the most wonderful day. We walked and we talked and—oh, have I told you how wonderful he smells? And he has the softest hands.”
“You ask me,” said her mother, “he smells fishy. Tell you what, next time you see him, you ask him about this cousin of his. I’m not saying she is his cousin, and I’m not saying she’s not. I’m just saying that if she is, then he has hookers and strippers and good-time girls in his family and is not the kind of person you should be seeing romantically.”
Rosie felt more comfortable, now her mother was once more coming down against Fat Charlie. “Mum. I won’t hear another word.”
“All right. I’ll hold my tongue. It’s not me that’s marrying him, after all. Not me that’s throwing my life away. Not me that’ll be weeping into my pillow while he’s out all night drinking with his fancy women. It’s not me that’ll be waiting, day after day, night after empty night, for him to get out of prison.”
“Mum!” Rosie tried to be indignant, but the thought of Fat Charlie in prison was too funny, too silly, and she found herself stifling
a giggle.
Rosie’s phone trilled. She answered it, and said “Yes,” and “I’d love to. That would be wonderful.” She put her phone away.
“That was him,” she said to her mother. “I’m going over there tomorrow night. He’s cooking for me. How sweet is that?” And then she said, “Prison indeed.”
“I’m a mother,” said her mother, in her foodless flat where the dust did not dare to settle, “and I know what I know.”
GRAHAME COATS SATIN HIS OFFICE, WHILE THE DAY FADED into dusk, staring at a computer screen. He brought up document after document, spreadsheet after spreadsheet. Some of them he changed. Most of them he deleted.
He was meant to be traveling to Birmingham that evening, where a former footballer, a client of his, was to open a nightclub. Instead he called and apologized: some things were unavoidable.
Soon the light outside the window was gone entirely. Grahame Coats sat in the cold glow of the computer screen, and he changed, and he overwrote, and he deleted.
HERE’S ANOTHER STORY THEY TELL ABOUT ANANSI.
Once, long, long ago, Anansi’s wife planted a field of peas. They were the finest, the fattest, the greenest peas you ever did see. It would have made your mouth water just to look at them.
From the moment Anansi saw the pea field, he wanted them. And he didn’t just want some of them, for Anansi was a man of enormous appetites. He did not want to share them. He wanted them all.
So Anansi lay down on his bed and he sighed, long and loud, and his wife and his sons all came a-running. “I’m a-dying,” said Anansi, in this little weeny-weedy-weaky voice, “and my life is all over and done.”
At this his wife and his sons began to cry hot tears.
In his weensy-weak voice, Anansi says, “On my deathbed, you have to promise me two things.”
“Anything, anything,” says his wife and his sons.
“First, you got to promise me you will bury me down under the big breadfruit tree.”